What’s behind Germantown apartment fight?
Like many of the people who opposed The District at Watermark, a luxury apartment complex slated for Germantown, Tara Gorman believes the city has a lot of apartments.
Unlike the opponents, though, the apartments didn’t push her to join the fight in pushing out the proposed development.
“They (apartments) haven’t increased to the point where it’s bothered me,” said Gorman, who owns The Truffle Pig, an art and curios boutique just off Poplar Pike.
“The schools are getting a bit overcrowded, but they’re building a new school. And if it (apartments) brings in more business, so what?” she said, with a shrug.
Recently, however, some other Germantown residents were oblivious to the upside of another apartment complex in their neighborhood.
After listening to pleas from them, pleas in which they claimed, among other things, that more high-density housing would contribute to school overcrowding and plunging property values, its board of mayor and aldermen voted against allowing The District at Watermark to be built there.
On one level, the residents’ concerns are understandable.
In most communities, people desire development that is balanced and contributes to qualities of aesthetics and convenience.
But it’s doubtful that apartments that cost $1,000 or more a month will upend that balance. And regardless, building places for people who can’t afford to buy homes nowadays should take priority over paranoia about what might happen once they move in.
And in Memphis and around the nation, many people are grappling with that predicament.
The area is currently struggling with a housing shortage — largely because investors have been buying homes here and holding on to them to flip. Nationally, the shortage is exacerbated by people who won’t sell their homes because the mortgage interest rate they are locked into is lower than what they would receive on a new home.
What that means is people who may be earning middle-class salaries may choose to live in apartments like The District because there aren’t many homes for them to purchase.
And because Germantown’s median home cost is, according to Zlllow, more than $300,000, chances are many people would have a tough time affording a home there. Then there’s this. Even after listening to Germantown residents’ concerns about runaway growth and school overcrowding, it’s difficult to overlook the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) overtones in their objections.
Perhaps that’s because, at least since the 2000s, many communities have been fighting apartment complexes as if they were penitentiaries.
Chances are, said Charles McKinney, associate professor of history and the Neville Frierson Bryan Chair of Africana Studies at Rhodes College, many people in communities like Germantown see apartment dwellers through the same lens as prisoners.
“This is an age-old dynamic that continues to play across Shelby County,” McKinney said. “People want equality in the abstract, as long as it stays in the abstract. Fair housing, they’re all for it, but not if someone who is not of their socioeconomic status moves in...
“Blight, overcrowding, changing the character of the community, all those are proxies for race. Tragically, this isn’t new.” McKinney is right. It isn’t new. But what is new is this housing shortage; a shortage that is hurting people regardless of race and socioeconomic status.
Germantown residents are lucky. They’re lucky to be living in a place where all they have to worry about is whether a new high-rise apartment blocks their view, or whether more children will be going to their schools, when people struggling to find housing have to worry about where they’re going to live and how they will get their children to a decent school.
That’s why, when Germantown residents begin to close the door on apartment complexes, they close the door on opportunities for people who are simply trying to afford the best life that they can, and are going about their lives as best as they can.
Which is probably why they haven’t bothered people like Gorman.